Obly: clean shared links

A link you share says more than where it points. The moment you press "share",
a dozen fields are appended to the address: which account pressed the button,
from which app, inside which campaign, and to whom the link was handed. They
follow the link, not you, which means they follow everybody you send it to.

Obly takes them off.

FROM ANY SHARE MENU

Share a link the way you already do, pick Obly, and the clean link goes straight
on to the person you were sending it to. There is no screen in between and
nothing to confirm. You can install Obly and share a link before you have ever
opened it.

IN THE APP

• Paste a link and it comes back clean, already copied.
• Every parameter that came off is named, with what it recorded and who it
answered to. Nothing is removed silently.
• Read a QR code and Obly says what it contains, in words. It never opens,
dials or applies anything by itself: reading is not following.
• Carry your settings to another device with a QR code, with no account and no
server in the middle.
• The rule list keeps itself current: signed, checked, and switchable off.

WHAT IT WILL NOT DO

A cleaned link that no longer works is a worse outcome than a tracking
parameter left on. Obly removes what it knows, from the sites it knows, and
leaves everything else alone. A video timestamp, a page anchor, a product
variant, a search query: these stay.

NO ACCOUNT, NO TELEMETRY

A link you paste never leaves the device. There is no account to create, no
analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising identifier, and nothing to opt out
of.

Two requests are possible, and each is described where it is switched. Once a
day, Obly asks obly.link whether the catalogue of tracking parameters has
changed, and checks its signature before using any of it: that request carries
no cookie and no identifier, it is the same request for everybody, and turning
it off keeps the rules this version shipped with. Expanding a shortened link is
the other, and it stays off until you turn it on, because it reveals the address
to the shortening service. Nothing you paste is ever part of either.

The camera is used on one screen, to read a QR code, at the moment you ask for
it. Nothing is recorded and no image leaves the device.

FREE AND OPEN SOURCE

Obly is published by NoobGang, a non-profit association, under the Apache 2.0
licence. The whole thing is readable at github.com/charlie404/obly, including
the catalogue of rules: you can check what it removes, and from where, without
taking anyone's word for it.